[tex-hyphen] Finnish basic hyphenation rules

[Teemu Likonen]

Hi!

I asked a quite specific question in Tex Stack Exchange (see [1]) about
Finnish hyphenation rules. The question and answer transitioned to more
general talk about what would be good for Finnish hyphenation, in my
opinion. This mailing list is probably better place for such talk so
I'll continue here.

The current Finnish hyphenation rules in Tex implement Finnish (quite
simple) hyphenation rules but in addition to that they try to address
some problems in compound words. This doesn't work very well. To really
hyphenate Finnish compound words there must a spelling checker which
knows where the words are. So Tex Finnish hyphenation patterns fail most
of the time with compounds.

The current Tex system also causes unexpected hyphenation (as I
described in [1]). Finnish people understand the basic rules well but
Tex Finnish patterns has some magic that works sometimes against what we
would expect about hyphenation.

So, that being the case, in my opinion, Tex should not even try to do
clever magic with Finnish compounds. The patterns should implement just
the basic hyphenation or line-breaking rules. That would produce
expected output and Finnish writer would know when a \- is needed
between two words in a compound.

The current Finnish patterns in Tex are quite old and established. I'm
not sure if it is a good idea to change them. Many people probably have
documents with hyphenation hints which are adjusted precisely for the
current hyphenation patterns. So it would be great if there was some
kind of easy to choose "basic" hyphenation variant for Finnish. That
would just implement the basic rules without any magic.

Unfortunately I don't understand Tex hyphenation technically and
currently can't offer code patches. Anyway, the basic Finnish
hyphenation and line-breaking rules are described in [2] and that is
meant for humans, not computers.


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[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/535843/why-finnish-hyphenation-doesnt-work-correctly-with-words-starting-with-laus

[2] http://www.kielitoimistonohjepankki.fi/haku/tavutus/ohje/153


-- 
/// Teemu Likonen - .-.. http://www.iki.fi/tlikonen/
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